


Moenia

by auroralynches (teresavampa)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Study, Dialogue Heavy, Friendship, Gen, Light Angst, Long-Distance Friendship, No Plot/Plotless, One Shot, Phone Calls & Telephones, Post-Canon, post-Opal short story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-30 00:07:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13938360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teresavampa/pseuds/auroralynches
Summary: Moenia(noun): city walls."Remember when we were both living at Monmouth and whenever we couldn't sleep we'd go to the 24-hour grocery on Mary Street?"Or, Ronan calls Gansey during the road trip.





	Moenia

**Author's Note:**

> This whole fic is literally just an expression of some of my feelings about Ronan and Gansey's friendship, which happens to take the form of a conversation between Ronan and Gansey. It does not have a plot or major emotional arc, though it does have some kind of vague and messy central theme. I'm telling you this at the top so you aren't disappointed when you get to the end and there was no plot.
> 
> Listening to ["The Mighty Rio Grande"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVScQyuuu6A) by This Will Destroy You may or may not enhance the experience of reading this fic. It certainly enhanced the experience of writing it, and that song very much captures the mood I was aiming for with this.

Ronan was restless.

He had woken in the morning full of an unpleasantly humming, itching energy that strained against his skin. In an effort to disperse it, he’d cleaned the kitchen and reorganized the largest equipment barn and explored the fall-hued woods with Opal and, when all of that had failed to soothe him, thrown himself into the BMW and gone charging up and down the empty midnight highways for nearly two hours.

Nothing worked. He’d given up and returned to the Barns around three in the morning, pacing aimlessly through the hallways of the farmhouse until finally retreating to his bedroom. He didn’t bother turning the lights on; he could cross the floor to his bed on muscle memory alone. His head sank onto the decorative pillowcase Aurora had crocheted for him when he was eight, which he had never liked but couldn’t bear to get rid of. He felt a small weight hit the bed beside him and realized his phone had slid out of his pocket.

Ordinarily, Ronan hated using his phone to communicate with anyone but Adam. There was something about the simplicity of a call, a text, that stripped away everything he’d constructed to keep people at bay, every snarling piece of his carefully crafted persona. The fact of the matter was that reaching out to someone on the phone inherently told them that you needed them, and above all else Ronan hated feeling vulnerable.

Tonight, though, he was too wired to pretend he didn’t care. He picked up his phone and dialed Gansey.

Gansey answered swiftly. Despite the late hour, his voice was alert and full of urgency as he said, “Ronan, what’s going on? Are you alright? Is Adam alright?” Ronan heard a door shut softly in the background and pictured with perfect clarity a pajama-clad, barefoot Gansey stepping out of whatever motel room he’d been sleeping in, closing the door behind him to avoid waking Blue and Henry.

Ronan closed his eyes against the darkness of his room. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Adam has a chem midterm in the morning, so I can’t call him right now.”

“I wouldn’t call having a chem exam fine,” Gansey said wryly. Chemistry had never been his best subject. Gansey liked grand things, and something about the tiny scale of chemistry was difficult for him to wrap his head around. Ronan had simply lost interest once he realized how infrequently things actually blew up. “So what’s up?”

“I don’t know. I guess nothing. It’s just... remember when we were both living at Monmouth and whenever we couldn’t sleep we’d go to the 24-hour grocery on Mary Street?” What Ronan was really saying was that he had no one to do something like that with right now, and this phone call was the closest he could get to that sleepless companionship. Opal was around, of course, but as a dream thing she was not much comfort when it came to insomnia.

“Technically, you’re still supposed to be living at Monmouth,” Gansey reminded him. The version of his father’s will that Ronan had dreamed up specified that he could not take up full-time residence at the Barns until Matthew had turned eighteen, a self-imposed caveat that Ronan could no longer remember his reasoning for. He thought it must have had something to do with fear. Possibly he’d just been afraid to give himself everything he wanted all at once, but also possibly he’d been afraid that if he left Monmouth then Gansey would no longer feel obligated to maintain their friendship.

This was an ugly side of himself that Ronan did his best to suppress, but it was rearing its head once again during this phone call.

“I only went over once after you guys left,” Ronan admitted. “I haven’t been there in a couple months.”

“Not even to check in? What if we got robbed?” Gansey said chidingly.

Ronan wanted to say _no one wants to steal your shit, Gansey_ , but what came out instead was, “The last time I went it was like my parents’ room.”

He could practically hear Gansey’s brow wrinkle over the phone. “What on Earth do you mean?”

“I mean I was in there alone, and your stuff was there but you weren’t.”

“That’s how travel works, yes.”

“Don’t be an asshole. I mean it was like...” His voice grew softer and softer during the last sentence until it trailed off entirely.

“Like?” Gansey prompted.

Ronan whispered, “Like you were dead.”

Gansey was quiet for a moment before making an attempt to lighten the mood. “What, again? They do say third time’s the charm.”

Ronan didn’t laugh or raise his voice. “No. Like you’d been dead a long time and I’d just managed to forget about it for a little while.” He didn’t know how to explain the sick, choking feeling he’d gotten seeing Gansey’s world inside Monmouth Manufacturing almost perfectly unchanged in the months since Gansey had left on his road trip. He just knew that there was something unbearable about opening the door to his old apartment and seeing that there were no new projects on the desk, no new buildings in the miniature Henrietta, no fresh wrinkles in Gansey’s unmade bed. The only difference had been in the potted mint plant, now brown and desiccated under the same perfectly even layer of dust that had coated the entire room.

At that moment, Ronan had not known any difference between looking into Monmouth Manufacturing and looking into his parents’ bedroom, knowing that its former occupants were never coming back.

Now Gansey went silent for so long that Ronan had to pull the phone away from his ear to check that the call hadn’t dropped. Suddenly very unwilling to hear what Gansey might say in response to this information, Ronan said more normally, “Forget it. Where are you right now?”

“Ronan—" Gansey started.

“No, seriously, man. Forget I said anything. Just tell me about wherever you’re at right now.”

Gansey sighed, but it was a sigh of aimless melancholy rather than frustration. “Washington coast. Near Cape Disappointment.”

“Same. Oh—that’s a real place?”

“Yes, right by the Oregon border.”

“What’s it like? Rainy as shit?”

“No,” Gansey said. His voice was impossibly gentle. “No, it’s lovely—sunny, crisp, clouds like cotton. The air’s so clear out here.”

“Clear how?”

“Clear like—" Ronan could hear a faint scrabbling sound on the other end, fingernails on stone. Probably Gansey scraping against a wall as he leaned over a balcony, twisting to get a better look past the confines of the motel. “—like during the day you can see every tree on the hills miles away across the water, and at night you can see every star so bright it’s like an LED screen. I wish you could see it,” he added wistfully.

“Your phone has a camera, you know,” Ronan said. “And Cheng has that fancy digital camera if your phone isn’t HD enough.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Gansey said softly. “I wish you could see it in person. I wish you’d come with us. Adam too.”

Ronan turned his head to the side and stared at the crocheted pillowcase, only visible in the dark by its contrast with the white linen beneath. He rubbed a loop of it between his thumb and forefinger, the bumpy texture familiar if not exactly pleasant. “We couldn’t. And even if we could, we didn’t want to. And even if we’d wanted to, we wouldn’t have gone anyways.”

“I don’t understand.”

Ronan struggled to get the words out. It wasn’t that he didn’t have them, but they acknowledged something that both Ronan and Gansey preferred to pretend didn’t exist. Speech would make everything so much more real. “This was your trip. For the three of you. Parrish and I weren’t meant to be a part of it.”

“Ronan, you don’t mean that,” Gansey said. Now his voice was disapproving, as though Ronan was being petulant rather than honest. There were few things Gansey hated more than the insinuation that his friendship with any one of his four closest companions was different from his friendship with any of the rest, even when it was true.

“It doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” Ronan said. He wasn’t lying, but he was telling a truth he didn’t believe in, and that was even worse than being a liar. He knew that it was okay—healthy even—for him and Gansey to not always be joined at the hip, to have parts of their lives the other was not entangled in. He also knew that it rubbed him raw every time he remembered how long it had been since he and his best friend had done anything as just the two of them. Nevertheless, he tried to make his voice light as he elaborated, “Shit changes, man. We aren’t part of your year of Kerouac bullshit, and you three aren’t a part of what me and Adam do at the Barns.”

His lightness seemed to have worked on Gansey. Rather than resistance or denial, Gansey instead offered up, “I’m pretty sure your platonic friends aren’t supposed to be a part of that anyways. At least not without a great deal of discussion first.”

“You fucking perv. I meant things like experimenting with dream magic and the ley line, is all.”

Gansey let out a breathless laugh. “Not quite the same as going on a road trip, is it?” he said.

“We’re at very different phases in our lives,” Ronan agreed. “You’re at the ‘going on youthful adventures to find yourself’ bit, and I’m at the ‘manipulate reality with the help of your psychic boyfriend’ part.”

“Two of the classic stages of human development,” Gansey said, using the same solemn, knowledgeable tone he’d used when giving presentations at school. “Freudian, I think.” This, finally, was what cracked Ronan, and laughter exploded from him before he could help himself. Gansey, delighted to have provoked such a response in him, laughed too.

After a few moments, they quieted, and Gansey said, “We’ll be back in April, you know.”

“I know,” Ronan said.

“It’ll come sooner than you think. So soon,” said Gansey.

“I know,” Ronan said.

“I just...” Gansey struggled on the other end of the line. It was not like him to be lost for words, but it was very like him to have trouble expressing his feelings, and right now the latter was dominating the former. “Do you remember what I said to you last July? Not this past one, but the one before, when Adam and I went to my mom’s campaign event,” he said.

Ronan remembered. “You told me to dream you the world,” he said.

“Keep doing that.”

The emotion in Gansey’s voice made Ronan ache. “It’s not like that anymore,” he said, groping to reassure his friend. “I’m not, like, gonna _die_ or something. You don’t have to worry about taking care of me.”

“I’m not worried about taking care of you,” Gansey replied. “I’m not even worried about you taking care of yourself, because I know you can do that just fine.” The word _now_ was left off the end of the sentence, but they both heard it anyways. “I’m worried about you being lonely, because you’re my best friend and I don’t want you to be sad.”

Ronan considered this. The thing was, he didn’t think he _was_ sad. Lonely—maybe at this particular moment, yes, but his life was not overall devoid of companionship. Opal was frequently with him, and Matthew and Declan still came down for church every Sunday. The women of 300 Fox Way regularly came over to the Barns or called him into Henrietta to probe his mind for insights into the ley line or ask him how Adam was doing or present him with homemade food in a gruff and unsentimental sort of way. So he knew it wasn’t loneliness or melancholy that was eating at him. The truth was as simple as this: Gansey was gone, and Ronan missed him. There was nothing more to say.

But there was no cure for missing someone except that person coming back to you, and even Ronan wasn’t selfish enough to ask Gansey to do that. “I promise I’m not sitting around by myself crying over you all day,” he said acerbically, once again defaulting to cruelty to put distance between himself and genuine connection. God, he hated phones. He was beginning to wish he hadn’t called.

Gansey, unfortunately, was immune to Ronan’s barbs from long exposure. “You don’t have to be like that,” he said calmly. “You can just say you’re fine and I don’t need to worry.”

Ronan softened. More conversationally, he said, “I’m really doing okay. You know, farm life suits me.”

Gansey mercifully once again went along with the change in topic instead of probing further. “How is the farm, by the way? I haven’t been there since… February, I think.”

“S’good. We’ve been getting a lot of rain lately, which is great for the mudpit. Have I told you about the mudpit?” Gansey confirmed that he had not. “It’s a pit. Made of mud. Turned the back field into a racetrack for the bimmer.” Ronan knew this would offend Gansey on a number of levels and looked forward to the entertainment value of his reaction. Moreover, it was his way of silently saying, _Hey, I’m still the same person when you’re not around_. Ronan, who was not overly concerned with most people’s feelings at the best of times, considered it one of the more thoughtful things he’d ever done for someone.

Gansey took a long time to reply, and when he did, his voice sounded weak. “Ronan, you are going to destroy your fucking car,” he managed.

Ronan laughed. “You sound like Parrish,” he informed him.

“I sound like the voice of reason. Mudding is already _so_ dangerous, and you’re doing it in a _BMW—_ ”

“Hey, my farm, my rules, man.”

“Jesus, speaking of farm life, don’t you have to be up in, like, half an hour? It’s goddamn 3:45 AM there.”

“Yup, I’m a terrible employee,” Ronan confirmed. “I’ll probably have to fire myself.”

“I hope you give yourself generous severance, at least,” Gansey said. He paused before asking, “You promise you’re okay?”

Ronan smiled. It was a slow smile and not entirely happy, but genuine nonetheless. “Would I lie?”

On the other end of the line, Gansey seemed to be smiling too. “Goodnight, Lynch,” he said.

“ ‘Night, Gansey.” When he hung up, Ronan stared at the ceiling for a while, then pushed to his feet and headed purposefully towards his parents’ room. It was a small but charming space with angled ceilings and bright white walls. It would be a waste to leave it as an untouched, forever-vacant shrine to the past. It could be a thousand things—a sunroom, a library, a studio. It was a blank canvas which he could give a new purpose for every season.

Nothing could stay the same forever. That didn’t have to be a bad thing.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't recommend writing fic during midterms, because you'll do shit like title your story after one of your Latin vocab words, or write 1500 words in two sleepless hours and then be too busy to revise or add to it for over a week.
> 
> Anyways, I'm astrailhads over on Tumblr, though I don't really enjoy or use Tumblr very much anymore. But, like, say hi if you want to.


End file.
